As a crisis response chaplain, I have been intrigued with how some people get overwhelmed with their trauma while some people seem to not only bounce back but thrive after what would be life-altering events. I think of this because my firefighters see horrible things in their jobs, and some have a tough time with the memories while some seem to do okay. As a chaplain serving our first responders in the crisis moment, I want whatever I do to promote mental, emotional, and spiritual health in the future so they can not only survive but thrive in life.

It all comes down to stress.

When our first responders are in the middle of a cardiac arrest, pulling people out of a wreck or burning building, hearing screams of the wounded, seeing the sights, and smelling the smells, they are under an enormous amount of stress. Even though they are in a situation that is not normal for the average person, their stress reaction is natural for people who are highly trained to deal with these events. And when their "fight or flight" reaction kicks in, these folks, with all their training, tend to get into the fight and run towards the emergency instead of away from it. But sometimes things get out of whack, and they don't come back to homeostasis, and this is where we see PTSD, moral injury, and compassion fatigue.

Most people, including firefighters, handle life's stressors without too much problem. They don't want or need help after a traumatic incident. Usually, after a couple of hours to days, most will no longer see the effects of the stress event. They are sleeping better, eating normally, and their relationships with their family, peers, and the public have returned to normalcy. They have cataloged the memory of the stress. And even though it may be a bad memory, they have made some sense out of it in accordance with their worldview. But for others, the stress in their life has now become unmanageable.

I've always liked the stress bucket model. This says we have a bucket into which all our stress goes. The buckets are different sizes for different people. We place all our stress in life in this bucket. For the most part, it is very manageable, but when stress starts to overflow, it starts to overwhelm, and then the stress controls us instead of us controlling it. Unfortunately, for many of my first responder friends, this stress bucket is constantly at the edge of overflowing as they bounce from one crisis to another and find very little peace in life.

What psychology says about coping and resilience.

Over the years, I have come to appreciate more and more psychology and pharmacology as it relates to mental distress reactions. When the mind and body get out of whack, sometimes we need this kind of help to get unstuck in our healing process. This fits very well with Maslow's hierarchy of needs. The more basic needs must be met before the psychological and self-fulfillment needs can be addressed. But psychology and medicine/pharmacology tend to be morality-neutral at best and tend to bring people only back to a pre-reaction state instead of finding resiliency. I have found the tendency is to try to mitigate and alleviate the symptoms while allowing a person to retain his/her worldview. But it's the worldview that tends to be the problem. How one catalogs those intrusive memories into one's views of a just/unjust world will directly affect how quickly and how fully one recovers from the stress injury. And our first responders live in a just/unjust world on a daily basis.

How does faith/religion deal with coping?

According to Kenneth Pargament, in his book "The Psychology of Religion and Coping," he states that coping is a search for significance in times of stress. Our orientation to the world and the sacred is out of kilter, and we find ourselves on the quest to find how we fit in. In contrast, faith in the Devine helps pull our focus away from what is wrong with the world and bring about the new perspective that is so desperately desired. While not all religious experiences are positive, most provide a time-tested way to view the world, and it hurts. Pargament says, "Religions of the world have a deep appreciation for the often-painful nature of the human condition. Even more important though, religious traditions articulate their visions of how we should respond to this condition." (pg. 3) In this response, we find the beginnings of coping and resiliency.

I know that crisis response chaplains come from many different faith traditions. I'm Christian, but I know of chaplains who are Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, Mormon, and Catholic, and I've even met Wiccan. While we do not agree on orientation with the sacred, I think we can all agree on our task in relation to the people we serve as they search for significance.

1. We help provide/find meaning in context to the traumatic event. This will be tested by the person who is hurt to see if this orientation is something that they can find stability in.

2. We help the wounded person find significance that will allow the hurt to heal beyond where they were before the traumatic event. The goal of people of faith is not to survive in this world of traumatic stress but to thrive.

But people cannot cope with resources they do not know they have. This is where a good chaplain comes in. I always believe that a chaplain must be seen and must be accessible. Chaplains must be strong in their faith in order to support others. Most of all, a good chaplain must have a strong understanding of the divine to bring hope to people in crisis and promote mental, emotional, and spiritual health so they can survive and thrive in life.